The Internet is a rapidly growing communication network of interconnected computers around the world. Together, these millions of connected computers form a vast repository of hyperlinked information that is readily accessible by any of the connected computers from anywhere at any time. To provide mobility and portability to the Internet, wireless computing devices have been introduced. The wireless computers are capable of communicating with the computers on the Internet using wireless data networks connected to the Internet. With wireless computers using wireless data networks, people are able to travel about and yet perform the same tasks they could do with computers directly connected the Internet.
The most common wireless access paradigm of today is a laptop personal computer equipped with a wireless communication mechanism. For example, a laptop may be equipped with a wireless modem for communication with the Internet. This paradigm may be useful for a considerable number of applications and users, but there has been a growing need for a mobile paradigm in which the Internet can be instantly accessed by smaller mobile computing devices such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). With increasing data processing capabilities in the new smaller mobile computing devices, more and more users are carrying such devices around to convert unproductive time into productive time.
Many networked computers, however, use different character character sets. For example, most web servers in the United States use the US-ASCII character set to represent English while web servers in Japan often use Shift-JIS (Shift-JIS ISO-2022-JP) or UNICODE to represent Japanese. Many web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator by Netscape Corporation or Internet Explorer by Microsoft Corporation provide utilities to perform transcoding of character sets, when a client device and a server device communicate in different character sets. However, the client device, such as a desktop personal computer, equipped with a web browser has sufficient computing resources, such as a fast processor and ample memory, to perform the transcoding locally without sacrificing performance noticeably.
To increase portability and mobility, most mobile computing devices, however, are designed small in size, light in weight, low in power consumption, and as economical and portable as possible. Such "thin" designs often have very limited computing resources. These designs typically have the equivalent of less than one percent of the computing power provided in a typical desktop or portable computer, and memory capacity of less than 250 kilobytes. Such thin client devices would not have sufficient computing resources to perform the character set transcoding locally. There is thus a great need for providing the thin client devices with a mechanism to communicate with servers that use a different character set than thin client device.